Teaching Content Marketing At A University Level: An Interview with Bill Belew

As part of our SEJ interview series, I recently caught up with blogger Bill Belew to discuss the keys to creating good content.

Bill teaches a University class on SEO and content marketing, where he has taught students with no prior online marketing experience how to build blogs that were generating 4,000 to 7,000 unique monthly visitors within 4 months of being in his class. The key to their success, Bill says, was simply creating good content.

What are the most important things marketers need to do when creating good content? Hear Bill explain in the video below:

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

The most important thing you can do, Bill says, is hit the ‘Publish’ button. Don’t become so concerned with perfecting and constantly tweaking your content that it doesn’t even end up getting published.

Bill taught his students to follow a template that consisted of 10 basic requirements that every piece of content should have. One of the most important out of those 10 things was the title.

Above all else, you need to get your title right. Bill taught his students an unorthodox method of saving articles to their computer and having them try to find the articles several months later. If the students could easily find the article they needed using their computer’s search function, then it was a good title and fit to publish on their blogs.

Bill believes creating any content versus no content at all is one of the best things you can do in today’s marketing landscape.

“If you just hit the Publish button a bunch of time, it’ll work,” Bill says, but he also adds you need to have some sense about it.

Content is key to getting people to show up to your site in the first place, but of course the content needs to be good in order to keep visitors coming back.